This little Hobbit-hole, which is a real family home in Wales, was built to strict environmental guidelines about 3 years ago. The website for the building has some great shots of its construction, using local materials like found wood, stone, soil, bales of straw and much mud. I really admire a family that can let their

It feels a bit random, but GeoGreeting.com spells out your own, personal message using buildings that are shaped like letters and found on Google maps. Nicest part of the experience is that it finds the buildings as you type, and moves a map around to show their location.

Got to admire Google for installing all these solar panels on their roof. I love the site they’ve made that does a live track of how they’re performing. “This installation is projected to produce enough electricity for approximately 1,000 California homes or 30% of Google’s peak electricity demand in our solar powered buildings at our

In this article on Spiked, Alex Taylor (who’s also in Socio-Digital Sytems) talks about privacy. He draws attention to how the current debate around this issue is so alarmist, focused primarily on the extremes of the invasion of personal liberties, and the dystopian future that envisages. The reality of privacy, though, is much more subtle

Multi-touch is all the rage at the moment, but is something that Microsoft and members of the team I’m in have been looking at for quite a number of years. Steve Hodges, manager of the Sensors and Devices team in Cambridge, reveals a new technical approach to multi-touch in the video below. The key to

The Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern gallery in London is my most favorite space in London. It’s huge, free to the public, and has been used very imaginatively and bravely by the museum. Now Pentagram have put together an exhibition in the space called Global Cities. Haven’t been, but I am likely to, and if anyone

Last November Tim Regan and I traveled to Brussels for Innovation Day 2006. This event was originally started by Microsoft Research Cambridge as a forum to show the work that we do to a broad, primarily academic audience across Europe. A way of avoiding them all having to travel to the UK. It’s grown quite

30 years after dropping out of Harvard Bill gates goes back to get his degree. Although much of his commencement speech deals with the serious issues he’s attempting to tackle with his foundation, there are also quite a few lighthearted bits, like this: “Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there,